Canvas

All Course instructors will receive their live course shells in Canvas automatically before the beginning of the semester.

Navigate to ORCA where you can request course merging, cross-listing, and/or rename your course. From within ORCA, you also have the ability to enroll TAs, Graders, and Course Designers.

Tip: All individuals associated with a course in Canvas are required to have completed FERPA and Information Security Awareness training in TrainTraq. This includes Canvas course associate roles (Lead TA, TA, Designer, Grader, Grade Submitter).


If you need practice or development shells, email support@instructure.com. Practice and development shells do not have any associated student enrollments, so you can experiment and build your course content freely. Once you have finalized your course, you can move the content into a live course shell.

Access your course to begin setting it up by following these steps to log in to Canvas:

1. Navigate to https://canvas.tamu.edu
2. Login using your TAMU NetID and password

The Texas A&M University Course Template has been added to all live course shells for instructors. It makes Canvas easier to use for course instructors and provides resources for students to augment their learning experience.

The template includes:

• Four frequently used buttons designed to provide students with quick and efficient access to course information such as the Syllabus, Academic Resources, University Resources, and information about instructor Office Hours
• Links to Canvas, Academic, and University Resources for students
• A pre-built Syllabus page that contains the Texas A&M Minimum Syllabus Requirements which can be modified to add your course-specific content
• Numbered module navigation buttons that allow students to access their learning materials directly from the homepage

Tip: After you modify the syllabus with your own content, you can print to PDF to add it to Howdy. 

The Course Navigation Menu is a series of links on the left side of your course that helps you and your students access different course areas.

A few pre-set course navigation buttons have been enabled to provide students a way to quickly and easily locate course content. 

By default, these Canvas features are turned on for students to access:

• Announcements

• Modules

• Grades

• Zoom

Canvas also has features that are currently disabled from the student perspective. When enabled, students can use them to navigate directly to assignments, files, and quizzes without sequentially viewing all created content.

As a best practice, we recommend course instructors to add all course files, assignments, quizzes, and discussions into a Module to prevent skipped navigation to sequential content, add all course files, assignments, quizzes, and discussions into a Module.

Additional resource:
How to manage Course Navigation links?

In the Texas A&M University course template, sample course content asset have been provided within the Instructor Module. These assets can be duplicated and added into Modules as necessary.   

These assets include:

• Overview and To Do List: A Page that introduces the Module and to do list of all of the required materials and assessments.   
• Presentation/Lecture: A Page formatted to embed lectures and presentation with a sample Google Slide.
• Assignment: An Assignment with 0 points with sections for an overview, guidelines, and links to technical support.
• Wrap-up and Looking Ahead: A Page that closes the module to re-cap the content and preview the upcoming Module.

Additional resources:
What is the Rich Content Editor?
Using Mediasite in Canvas

We recommend you use Modules to organize your course content. Using Modules enables you to organize your course that can make it easier for your students to navigate to specific resources and activities throughout the semester. In every course template, we have included weekly module buttons to allow for greater flexibility among all modalities. 

Modules can also make it easier for you to manage and update the content in your course over time. All modules can be viewed by clicking the Modules tab on the course navigation menu.

Modules offer you logical and user-friendly options to determine how you want your students to progress through your course:

• Lock a module until a specific date and time to ensure that students access course content at the appropriate time.
• Prerequisites applied to entire modules ensure students complete each module in a specific order (e.g., students must complete Module 1 before they are able to access Module 2, etc.).
• Requirements within a module ensure students complete each module item in a specific order (e.g., students must view a lecture video before they can access a quiz assessing their understanding of that lecture video).

 
We encourage you to take a look at our best practices for online teaching and learning to optimize the online learning environment for you and your students.

Tip: Use the Modules feature in Canvas to host all course content. These can be organized by week, chapter, or unit.

The Gradebook in Canvas is an efficient and powerful tool for entering grades, tracking student performance, and communicating grades to students. You can customize your Gradebook to your preferences by arranging and sorting columns, filtering by student names and assignments, and sorting by assignment type.

In Canvas, you can also create assignment groups to organize assessments and view grades in different groups. You can create groups for different types of activities, different modules of your course, or any other criteria that may be appropriate for your course setup and grading scheme. Your groups can then be weighted with different percentages to determine students’ final grades.

Tip: Use assignment groups to categorize assignments in a way that makes sense for your course. The benefit to this could be for organizing assignments, weighting final grades, and much more. Using weighted groups allows you to weigh an assignment group for a specified percent of the final grade.


Further resources:
How to use the Gradebook?
How to create assignment groups?
How to weight course grades based on assignment groups?

In Canvas, there are multiple ways to assess student learning:

• Assignments: For file-based or text-based submissions (e.g., Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints, typing in content directly).
• Discussions: For asynchronous interaction to keep discussion of ideas and course concepts going beyond the classroom.
• Quizzes: For quizzes, tests, exams, and homework assignments in a quiz-like format.

Tip: Incorporate Rubrics and use the Speedgrader to grade assignments, discussions, and quizzes.

Further Resources:
How to use Speedgrader?
How to add a rubric?

Communication is key to maintaining a strong connection to your students and ensuring your active presence in your online course. Canvas has many options available for communication. Instructors can personalize their messages by posting audio and video messages in Discussions, Speedgrader, Inbox messages, and Announcements. Here is a list of the communication tools you can take advantage of in Canvas and a brief description of the uses for each:

• Announcements: Use Announcements to serve as the main communication source for students to receive updates for your course due dates, deadlines, and other just-in-time information.
• Inbox: Use the Canvas inbox feature to send an email to students individually or in groups.
• Gradebook messages: The Canvas Gradebook has a feature called "message students who" which allows you to message groups of students based on their status in relation to a specific assignment. This feature allows you to send simultaneous messages to all of the students who fall into certain grade-related categories for a specific assignment.
• Calendar: The Canvas Calendar tool provides students with a to-do list in a calendar format, including Zoom class meetings, assignment due dates, appointments, and more. Note: Be sure to add due dates to learning activities to ensure students can view them via the calendar.
• Speedgrader: The SpeedGrader tool can be used to add feedback inline with student submissions, or through comments on a Rubric.

Tip: We recommend conducting all of your communication with students through Canvas to create efficiencies for you and a central hub where students know they can navigate to to communicate about course activities.

Help Desk Central assists Texas A&M students, faculty and staff with their IT questions by phone, email, chat, in person and on the web. IT Chat is available 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 a.m. (midnight) every day.

Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. | Phone: 979.845.8300 | Email: helpdesk@tamu.edu